Ionic Liquids as highly efficient decontamination systems for Chemical Warfare Agents

Andreia ROSATELLA^1,2, Tiago GONÇALVES³, Pedro NETO³, Paula LOPES³, Vânia TIRA-PICOS³, Carlos AFONSO^2
1CBIOS - Research Center for Biosciences & Health Technologies, Universidade Lusófona, Lisboa, Portugal
²Research Institute for Medicines (iMed.ULisboa), Faculdade de Farmácia da Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal
³UMLDBQ - Military Laboratorial Unit of Biological and Chemical Defense, Lisbon, Portugal

The use of chemical warfare agents (CWA) to kill or seriously injure not only military soldiers, but also civilian population is a serious threat nowadays, as witnessed in several terrorism attacks in different countries. Although international treaties have banned the development, production and storage of CWA, they are still being produced in some countries.
The ability to rapidly respond to such an attack is essential to decrease the number of casualties. In those cases, it is important not only to detect and identify the CWA but it is pivotal the decontamination not only of the materials but also the personnel, equipment and all the area affected by the CWA. There are several reported decontamination methodologies, although the decontaminants used in the field are mainly based on bleach, due to its low price and to the broad range of action against different CWA. Despite this, bleach-based decontamination systems have several disadvantages since they can be corrosive to some surfaces, toxic to human health, and harmful to the environment.[1-2]
In this work was developed a novel approach for CWA decontamination where a new material based on Ionic Liquids (ILs) can sequentially adsorb and absorb CWA’s from a contaminated surface, or atmosphere into the interior of the material. For that, several Ionic Liquids were synthetized and tested as sorbents for CWA simulants, resulting in high sorption rates.
Acknowledgements:
This research was sponsored by the NATO Science for Peace and Security Programme under grant G5713. The authors also thank Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) (Ref. PTDC/QUI-QOR/32008/2017, PTDC/CTM-CTM/29869/2017, UIDB/04138/2020, UIDP/04138/2020, UIDB/04567/2020 and UIDP/04567/2020, and EXPL/OCE-ETA/1109/2021) for financial support.
 
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